I would be careful using the Buffalo drives. We tried a few of their link stations and found out they were using ordinary drives. None of them lasted over two years and after a few drive replacements, we decided against fixing them again. Even through we had them in raid 5 mode, they were slow and went into degraded mode faster then any other raid we every used.

There are other options, such as purchasing a small nas or building nas by purchasing an external raid enslosure and adding your own server grade drives.

The most important requirement to use NTFS permissions is that the file system on the drive needs to be NTFS. You cannot assign NTFS permissions on a FAT32 drive.

Shared folders are stored on NTFS file system volumes. You can set permissions at the file level only if the files are stored on an NTFS volume. On a FAT or FAT32 volume, you can set permissions for shared folders but not for files and folders within a shared folder. Moreover, share permissions on a FAT or FAT32 volume restrict network access only, not access by users working directly on the computer.